Lviv, Ukraine: There are mobile apps to measure progress in the peace talks on Ukraine – and they are lighting up with warning signs.

The apps tell people across the country when their city or region is likely to feel the blast of a missile strike or drone attack, giving them time to seek safety in a bomb shelter.

The warning system is essential to saving lives and is based on the work of civil defence agencies tracking Russian missiles and drones through the air. It is like a weather forecast for impending terror, available on an iPhone screen.

Fire rages after a Russian missile hit a multi-storey residential building in Vyshgorod, outside Kyiv, on Sunday.Credit: AP

And for all the talk about a pathway to peace, the data displays an escalating war.

Yaroslav Kolodiy felt the impact on November 19 when Russian missiles slammed into two apartment buildings in his home city of Ternopil, in western Ukraine.

One of his friends, a mechanic, went to sleep that night as usual and died in the flames. His wife and children survived, badly injured. The attack was one of the worst of the war, killing at least 37 people, including seven children, and wounding more than 120 others.

Kolodiy, safe in his house, heard the explosions and felt the destruction. “You feel this freezing behind your chest,” he tells me. “It is a feeling like you are not in normal life. In the air, there is death.”

Black smoke and burning oil surrounded the buildings the next day, he says, and spread a physical as well as a psychological sickness over the city. One theory is that the missiles used infrared countermeasures to evade air defences.

Smoke rises in the aftermath of Russian strikes on........

© The Sydney Morning Herald